Skyviper 1,101 Posted April 20, 2020 F-117 Nighthawk QAF Presentation Show of hands, how many of you got to see this amazing aircraft up close and personal? I've loved the look of this plane for a long time and when researching it for this video it was really interesting to understand how it's weird design came to be. I'm going to hit you wonderful people this week with 3 video starting with the F-117 Nighthawk and I must thank the kind and awesome people at Lockheed Martin for providing all of the glamorous footage you're about to see. Tomorrow we'll feature the B-1 Lancer or Bone, then we'll feature the C-5 Galaxy on Wednesday before moving on with scheduled releases on Tuesday. I know most of you hear probably know much, much, more than I about these aircraft, so I'm looking forward to hearing from you how good we did compressing information into 3 minutes or less. Also if your appetite for the F-117 has been whet it would be a shame for me to not mention that you can add this aircraft to your virtual air force. A wonderful model released by Dels can be found here: 1 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
+russouk2004 6,959 Posted April 21, 2020 Did you know UK Test Pilot and some aerospace personnel worked at groom on Have Blue...and were part in designing its shape...test pilot I cant recall his name ,was one of the first to fly the 117 cool eh.. 1 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Skyviper 1,101 Posted April 21, 2020 58 minutes ago, russouk2004 said: Did you know UK Test Pilot and some aerospace personnel worked at groom on Have Blue...and were part in designing its shape...test pilot I cant recall his name ,was one of the first to fly the 117 cool eh.. That is pretty cool. I remember hearing a story about how someone asked why the SEA cammo paint job? It's supposed to fly at night right? 1 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
+Menrva 4,225 Posted April 21, 2020 (edited) A Nighthawk was shot down over Serbia, back in 1999. Luckily, the pilot ejected and was rescued by SAR. Fun fact; despite being a bomber aircraft, the Ace Combat series of videogames included the Nighthawk as a playable attack aircraft, capable of dogfighting with a purposely added machine gun, which IRL does not exist. I guess it's because this aircraft looks so iconic and unique, that the Ace Combat developers couldn't force themselves not to include it in their games. Edited April 21, 2020 by Menrva 1 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
+1977Frenchie 1,038 Posted April 21, 2020 When it came in CFB Bagotville (i think it's in 1997) my then brother in law was a CF-18 chief mechanic and i had the chance to meet the pilot the evening the plane came in. I took a picture of the plane the day after at the airshow and talked again to the pilot. The morning after i went to the base with my brother in law and we saw the pilot again before departure (sunday morning at 05:30) and we made the walk around with him! But he did not let me sneak in the cockpit :) But that was damn cool to see this special bird that close! 1 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
tiopilotos 2,587 Posted April 22, 2020 An interesting detail about stealth technology concept in general is that back in 1962 the Soviet mathematician Petr Ufimtsev published his research about the scattering of electromagnetic waves from two-dimensional and three-dimensional objects. At the time his research was considered to be of no significant military or economic value. A stealth engineer at Lockheed, Denys Overholser, had read the publication and realized that Ufimtsev had created the mathematical theory and tools to do finite analysis of radar reflection. This discovery inspired and had a role in the design of the first true stealth aircraft, the Lockheed F-117. Northrop also used Ufimtsev's work to program super computers to predict the radar reflection of the B-2 bomber. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petr_Ufimtsev 1 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
